Mega Blog

Day 5 & 6 of Two Dads One Land Yacht

To preface this: I was stuck in Yellowstone with no Internet or Cell service for 2 days, hence the delay and following huge 2 day blog…

THURSDAY 5/18

-6am Wake up & check road status

The previous night there had been a predicted 18 inches of snow that was to fall on Yellowstone National Park, and we were afraid that the entrance to the park from the Grand Teton side would be closed. As of 6am it still was.

-7am Teton Village & Moose Junction

Although we had clearly read online that the entrance to the park was closed as of 6am, we are idiots and proceeded to drive in that direction anyway hoping it might open by the time we got there. Along the way to the south entrance, it was snowing pretty heavy, you couldn't even see the Grand Tetons, and Slick Rick was pissed he couldn't find any Moose in a town literally called "Moose Junction". All we could find were a crap ton of Elk:

-8am Yellowstone South Entrance

After driving for a little over an hour, we finally reached the gate that was reported closed at 6am. We had been without cell service for our entire morning, so we had no way to check if the road was open besides actually driving up to it. Once we got there, of course it was closed, and the park ranger suggested we take a little detour around to the west entrance to the park. Out here, a "little detour" really means drive 4 hours through Idaho and Montana over 8 thousand foot mountains to get to the other entrance. We were off and running, but first we had to make a quick stop for Land Yacht's favorite past time:

-12noon Yellowstone West Entrance

After 4 hours of snow, mountain passes, and more potatoes than the world's McDonald's combined, we finally made it to Yellowstone.

-12:20pm Buffalo Roadblock

Only about 2 miles into the park, we hit a sea of red brake lights, hoping it would be a bear or something cool to see on the side of the road. We were wrong. Buffalo are basically in charge of Yellowstone; they do what they want when they want, and they really wanted to block traffic. A whole herd, about 20-30 of these things blocked both directions of traffic. One randomly came up behind us and ran by to catch his friends up at the front of the mile backup, you can see this guy in the video below. Slick Rick started calling buffalo "Stealth Buffalo", because these things are surprisingly sneaky for weighing 1/2 as much as the Land Yacht.

-1:50pm Passed the Buffalo

One and a half miserable hours later, we had finally passed the stealth buffalos, and were finally into the main part of the park. This place lives up to the hype...

-2pm Norris Geyser

This was the first big geyser area within the park, and the first geyser I had seen in real life. These things stink like rotten eggs, spew hot mist all over the place, and leave the ground looking like a barren wasteland. The park built a lot of cool boardwalks around the geysers, but since it had snowed over a foot the night before, and was about 30 degrees, these were super slippery (although my 4 year old Nike's had more grip than Slick Rick's nerd hiking shoes he bought just for this trip...)

-2:30pm Bears

Along the side of the road we saw a bunch of people pulled over taking pics of something, so we hopped on the tourist bandwagon and I got this pic of a Cub wandering a few yards away from his mom

-2:45pm Golden Gate

In order to get down to the area called Monmouth, you have to take this sketchy mountain pass within the park. Part of it is called "Golden Gate" and it almost looks fake, thats how cool it is. If you notice in the picture below, the road is suspended out over a 2,000 foot cliff (Mom you would've hated this road)

-3:10pm Monmouth

When we got down into the town / area of Monmouth, we were once again reminded that Buffalo rule this park. These things are basically town lawnmowers and just chill in the center of town all day eating grass and walking out into traffic. Slick Rick copped this pic of the Buffalo in front of a bank or something, but peep the "Stop for Pedestrians" sign next to them. These things basically are the pedestrians:

-3:45pm Tower Roosevelt

As you head down into this one huge valley in the park, you have to go over a decent sized ridge where you can overlook everything from a few thousand feet up. Slick was all hyped up and whipped out his binoculars (he calls them "knocks") faster than a cowboy in a quick draw to see if he could find his elusive moose. He didn't.

-4:30pm Soda Butte

Slick Rick had convinced me that we should drive into this valley because we could climb up this rock formation next to the road and overlook the valley. Sounded dope, so we kept on driving to it. When we got there, a ton of huge signs said "No climbing, keep off". Slick Rick's dad powers and map utility abilities had failed us, but we did at least see this buffalo and it's kid just being lawnmowers in a field.

-5:40pm I hate buffalo jams

We were headed back toward Old Faithful, where our hotel was for the night, and just as we turned onto the right road, bam. These stupid stealth buffalo...

-8pm Old Faithful Inn

After like 2 hours behind these dumb stealth buffalo lawnmower things, we finally got to our hotel, The Old Faithful Inn. This thing looked haunted and creepy as hell, and was build almost 120 years ago, but was a severe step up from our typical slum-dog Super 8 Motels we've been rocking thus far.

-9pm Old Faithful Round 1

After we got settled into the hotel and found some food, we walked around the lobby and saw that Old Faithful was supposed to go off in a few minutes. We headed outside, grabbed a seat on a bench in front of the below lawnmower stealth buffalo, and waited for the eruption.

FRIDAY 5/19

-7am Wakeup the frozen Land Yacht

Yellowstone is in a world of it's own when it comes to weather. We woke up to 19 degree weather, and holy crap I did not pack for winter. Land Yacht was frozen solid, but the thing's basically a carnivorous beast (aka meat machine) and started up first try.

-7:30am West Thumb Geysers

After relinquishing the inner powers of a frozen meat machine (Land Yacht), we cruised over to West Thumb to check out the geysers there. We were two out of the 5 people there, and were out numbered by the Elk chilling by the warm springs. These things were not afraid of people, and I'm pretty sure the one thought I was a fellow Elk because of the design on my jacket, and he started following me around. Bellow you can see a wild Slick Rick bonding with his fellow woodland friends along the boardwalk in the park...

-8:30am Winter Wonderland

I honestly felt like I was at home in January driving to the next stop on our journey, the snow on the trees told my brain it was winter, but the calendar is telling me it's basically memorial day. The reflection of the snow covered mountains on Lake Yellowstone seemed like a post card, so I had to get out and be a tourist for that picture too...

-8:50 Mud Volcano

This geyser was once upon a time a volcano that only spewed up hot mud way into the air above the tree line. Over time the volcano destroyed itself and is now just a stinky, gnarly looking bubbling pit of mud.

-9:10am South Rim Waterfall

There had been a lot of confusion between myself and Slick Rick on how exactly we could get to the South Rim area of the park. We both had messed up trying to get into the park the day before, and Slick's map abilities failed the day before, so we gambled a potential third strike by driving blind to the South Rim, but my god did we hit a home run. While we were up there, one of the Classic Yellowstone busses was parked next to Land Yacht and they quickly became friends.

-11am Old Faithful Part 2

We had seen Old Faithful in the dark the day before, and had to head back that way anyway, so we figured we would take a short hike up a ridge away from all the other people and try to see the eruption from a different vantage point. If you look at the pic below, in the right bottom corner you can see the creepy hotel from the night before.

-1:30pm Grand Prismatic

I had never heard of this natural spring until Slick Rick, and my roommate (shoutout killa) told me it was one of the things you HAD to see inside of the park. We took a quick stop there to check it out, and I'm glad we did. The spring is full of sulfur, and sits consistently at about 160 degrees year round, so it makes a crap load of steam, and produces all these funky colors because of the chemicals.

-3:40pm Upper Mesa Falls, Idaho

By this point we had left Yellowstone, and headed into Idaho where we will be spending all of Day 7. Along the way Slick Rick redeemed his map abilities and found this secret waterfall, it was pretty big and kinda came out of nowhere as before the waterfall was seen, there was only really potatoes, cows, and flat forests.

-4:30pm St. Anthony Sand Dunes

Idaho is a super interesting place to say the least. We had seen crap loads of potatoes, snow covered mountains, and more roads without speed limits than roads with speed limits. Slick Rick warned me that there were sand dunes in Idaho, but after only seeing the stuff I just mentioned, I was skeptical of how big these things would be. Slick Rick came thru once again. We thought we had wound up in the Sahara desert with huge sand dunes stretching for miles and miles. People riding dirt bikes and atv's all over the place made it seem like a different world, especially when only 3 hours ago it had been snowing and 19 degrees...

Overall these last 2 days have been jam-packed with cool new things to see, and more corny dad jokes than I could've ever imagined. I'm slowly getting Slick Rick hip to Ugly God, Lil Uzi, and Future and him trying to quote the songs after he's heard them is the greatest thing in the world. For those of you who don't know who those people I just named are, lets just say Slick Rick should definitely not become a professional rapper. Hopefully in the next few days I'll have internet and can post these on time, because writing this MEGA Blog was nowhere near as exciting as what Slick Rick has planned next.